They only touched tangentially on the Performa line; what made the Performa so horrendous, was that certain models were actually slower than the models they replaced. For example, the Performa 5200 had a crippled IDE bus, and the motherboard was based on a Quadra 605 board, giving the 75Mhz PPC 603 chip less performance than a PPC601 running at 88Mhz. See http://lowendmac.com/ppc/performa-5200.html

My first computer-of-my-very-own was my beloved Compaq Deskpro Portable (autoexec.bat ftw). It weighed in at just under 30 lbs.

Edit: I still have it some 25 years later, and it still works.

Another odd duck was the PoweCD. I owned one of these to go with my Duo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerCD

Did I say Duo? These dockable ultra-portables were fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo_2300c